A quick glance at the cast list of Steven Soderbergh’s new Netflix Original film The Laundromat suggests not only that the streaming service can attract the calibre of cast and crew that would’ve been unheard of outside of conventional film studios only a few years ago, but that the streaming giant really wants to win a few Oscars this season. I mean, it’s got Meryl Streep in it.
Streep plays Ellen Martin, a retiree whose holiday goes awry and who gets increasingly drawn into the complexities of the global financial system and the smoke and mirrors upon which it’s based. Martin’s tale is one of loss, frustration and the various disconnected people who get short-changed by the wealthy’s ever more complex measures to hide their money from the taxman, their own governments and, in some cases, even their own families.
One of those people is played by David Schwimmer, who basically reprises his role as Robert Kardashian in The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story. He’s well-meaning but naive, and surprised when it turns out people are prone to lying and deception… especially when there’s money involved. Except, this time, he’s poor, and he doesn’t get nearly as much screen time.
Support from the stars
As compelling as Streep’s performance is (of course it is, she’s Meryl bloody Streep), the real stars of the show are Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas, who play the legal team of Mossack and Fonseca (respectively). If those names ring bells it’s because they belong to the Panamanian law firm that was implicated in the leaked documents commonly called the Panama Papers.
Right up front, The Laundromat tells viewers it’s “based on actual secrets”, which it’s hard not to chuckle at. But also hints that Soderbergh is happy to play pretty fast and loose with the facts as long as they serve his ends.
Oldman and Banderas ham it up hard in bling-laden suits, swilling martinis and explaining in exceedingly broad brushstrokes, straight into the camera, how financial instruments work. It’s clear they’re having a lot of fun playing their wonderfully wicked characters, and Soderbergh’s decision to send up two such dastardly people is delicious, even if it’s not always totally effective.
Confused? You should be
The Laundromat flits between narrative and narrative techniques with unsettling regularity, but perhaps that’s part of the point. It never fully explains the machinations of Mossack and Fonseca’s operation, and it sometimes runs with the thread only to drop it right in the middle.
Sometimes it’s pretty confusing, but then, so is finance to anyone who’s never been able to afford the services of those who can successfully skirt the line between tax avoidance (legal, if frowned upon) and tax evasion (illegal, and also frowned upon, presumably with deeper brow furrows).
Other confusion comes from Sharon Stone having possibly her smallest role in the last three decades as a Las Vegas real estate agent in a shrink-wrapped mini skirt, and Jeffrey Wright’s almost-as-brief turn as the duplicitous but wonderfully named accountant, Malchus Irvin Boncamper.
Late capitalism, here we come
Right up front, The Laundromat tells viewers it’s “based on actual secrets”, which it’s hard not to chuckle at. But also hints that Soderbergh is happy to play pretty fast and loose with the facts as long as they serve his ends.
Those ends include illustrating how ludicrously corrupt the moneyed are, how effectively democracy and capitalism have been perverted to aid them in staying loaded, how deliberately the world of money has been obfuscated for regular folk, and getting those same regular folk pissed off about it.
And fair enough. Because the tale of the Panama Papers is a perverse and enraging one, and the secrets it revealed haven’t miraculously gone away in its wake.
It’s time to get mad. How mad? Meryl Streep mad.
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